mooredjm

urahara said:

I am with you on sound quality. 
But it’s nothing wrong to appeal to the masses (and not just a narrow audiophile market) and say that Music is in their DNA.
Music <> hardware sound quality. 

I agree with you that there is nothing wrong with appealing to the masses, however the "Music in our DNA" quote is pretty shallow. Most other streaming services offer a high res option. If music was in their DNA and they cared about it, they could at least offer Apple Lossless on Apple Music and in the store... But as you say, appealing to the majority of the market is OK, made them the Company they are today and enabled them to drive technology forward in many areas. For me there is nothing better than Apple for computer/tablet hardware and software but it would be nice to get the high quality audio in an Apple product not have to delve into separate audio player hardware and/or software when it comes to my own personal choice of listening to music at a "HiRes" level. 

All of the Beats/Apple headphone offerings are relatively low quality from a sound perspective. Beats are for bassheads, Airpods for people who like the functionality and don't care about sound quality. Apple, who claims music is in their DNA, still only offer compressed low-quality audio on Apple Music and at best mediocre audio quality headphones, poor sound capabilities on Macs and iPhones etc. They have never been in the high resolution audio market and prefer to cater to the masses not anyone who is remotely close to being an audiophile. Probably a very accurate analysis by Consumer Reports. Before anyone says I'm an Apple haterl, lets just say I have an iPhone, iPad Pro, 2019 i9 Macbook Pro and the latest Apple watch. Love their products. However when it comes to music streaming/purchase I chose hires music on Quobuz, have Shure KSE 1500 electrostats and use an Astell & Kern SP1000 as the quality from Apple in terms of audio largely sucks.

Seems like the Appleinsider forums have become a mirror of US society at the moment. No middle ground, just extremes of which both seem to have little grasp on reality.

Received my 15" 2.9 Ghz 32 GB Ram and 2 TB SSD today. Im not a "pro" user, whatever that is. Just an engineer in the oil industry, do a  bit of Autocad LT Mac, Lightroom for photographs, Final Cut Pro for editing drone videos of our drilling rigs, bit of engineering software that I write myself plus the usual office and project apps. So far I see Autocad rendering about 30% faster than my 15" 2017 3.1GHz Quad 16 GB 1TB SSD, Lightroom applying some batch processing about 50% faster. FCP about 70% faster, compiling with Xcode +/- 60% faster plus the computer seems much more responsive than even a 2017 15" MBP CTO doing boring old documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

You can argue about benchmarks and their accuracy or what software is optimised or not. The only thing that does matter to me (and I might add the absolutely overwhelming majority of computer users) is that I have upgraded to a much faster machine......oh and I was one of the minority (so the general press would have you believe) that never had a problem with a chiclet keyboard.. Wouldn't want to knock the people that have, in my case I just keep it clean, don't eat over it and give it a blast of compressed air once in a while when I am cleaning my camera. Not the best keyboard in the world but allows me to type as fast as any other keyboard I have used.......Thanks Apple, a nice upgrade. Found a buyer for my old 2017 CTO, fortunately he read and watched too much exagerated hype/trashing to want to splash out on a new 6 core..........